The United States of Irrelevance

11/3/12 10:33 PM EST

The award for the best campaign story of the day goes to a reporter who isn’t even on the election beat.

Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times, has a must-read about America’s shrinking electoral battleground, and the toxic effects of a system where the vast majority of states are ignored during presidential campaigns.

The current contest is just as close and intense, but the candidates have campaigned in only 10 states since the political conventions. There are towns in Ohio that have received more attention than the entire West Coast.

The shrinking electoral battleground has altered the nature of American self-governance. There is evidence that the current system is depressing turnout, distorting policy, weakening accountability and effectively disenfranchising the vast majority of Americans.

“It’s a new way to run a country,” says Bill Bishop, co-author of “The Big Sort,” a 2008 book that examined the most important cause of the trend: the recent tendency of like-minded people to live near one another.

That demographic shift means the country is now dominated by solidly Democratic states on the coasts and solidly Republican ones in the interior and in much of the South. In a close election, all of those states are completely out of reach for one candidate or the other.

The phenomenon Liptak writes about is well-known, but the figures he marshals – and the past landscape he chronicles -- are nevertheless eye-opening.

In 1960 and 1976, for example, there were 30 contested states including California, Illinois, New York and Texas – in 1976, both California and Texas were decided by three percentage points or less. Today, all have been largely reduced to ATM machine status in presidential elections because the results are a foregone conclusion.

The scene Liptak leads the story with, Nixon campaigning in all 50 states, is all but unthinkable today.

One reason, of course, is that many believe Nixon’s pledge to visit every state might have cost him the 1960 election since he refused to forego an Alaska trip in the final days – it was time that would have been better spent in a state offering a bigger electoral vote haul.

But, as Theodore White wrote in his groundbreaking work, The Making of the President 1960, Nixon’s rigorous and far-reaching schedule was a source of pride. “His press agents had already released the extent of his campaign in a statement: he had flown 65,500 miles, appeared in 188 cities at least once, made over 150 major speeches, and, they estimated, had been seen by 10,000,000 people in the flesh.”